Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce Color Shift, the first New York solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Owen Kydd.

Owen Kydd’s work pivots on a nuanced exploration of visual perception through tightly contained video loops that simultaneously function as still videos and extended photographs. Referred to by the artist as durational photographs, these works present near static segments of time that slowly reveal elements of movement or change. Instead of searching for a decisive moment, Kydd records a virtual stillness that lends a perceptual uncertainty to the frozen image.

Kydd’s conceptual concerns hinge on this ambiguity of seeing. Whereas one typically relies on images and objects for narrative cues, these works only offer up small pieces of information, rendering them as seemingly variegated or endless territories. Borrowing subjects from traditional photographic genre, Kydd’s storefronts, urban landscapes and studio-based images function as still lifes which propagate the familiarity and generality of photographs while allowing them to hover in a temporally enigmatic zone.